The 10 Most Depressingly Unfunny Gag Gifts

It's Christmas again, and that means it's time to stock up on food dehydrators and VHS copies of the Jean-Claude Van Damme opus Double Impact to give away as gifts to those you hold dear. And for your enemies? Oh, there will be special packages under the tree for them. Special packages that bear the slightest hint of peppermint and bile.

For years, one kind of gift has thrived in the dark corners of Christmasland amid the rancid cast-away cartons of eggnog and the semen-encrusted stockings of back alley elves -- gag gifts. The terrible irony of the gag gift is that it's a joke present that is somehow never funny. In fact, next to a genuinely funny gift, neither will elicit a laugh. Gag gifts are suck gifts. They suck the funny from a room as sure as a porn star will suck a suckable something. I can't be more specific, I've never gotten the parental locks off of my TV.

In the sea of gag gifts, some stand head and shoulders above others as the lamest of the lame, the worst of the worst. I put them in a list, because I love you. I have nowhere to go this Christmas. Please take me in.

#10. Fake Pregnancy Test

What's funnier than becoming a parent? Being tricked into thinking you've become a parent when in reality you've done nothing! Har! Presumably designed by the Maury Povich Laughy Time Smile Corporation, these fake pregnancy tests look like the real deal and even come in legit boxes designed to look like real tests. The gag is that they all come out positive. Oh man, good one! Remember how you always wanted a family? Well start thinking of baby names, Daddy. Maybe a good name would be Miles O'Bullshit, because your baby isn't real!

The target market for this gift is likely the sassy woman with no soul who likes to crush the hopes and dreams of her significant other, or just any abomination with a uterus. So Ann Coulter, basically.

#9. Toilet Turd

If you were to Google "gag gifts" right now, you'd discover fairly quickly that large percentages are made by fecalphiliacs. Gag gift makers love poop and spend hours in their dimly lit subterranean gag chambers producing all manner of shit merchandise, which I like to think they call mershitdise or merchandukes. Or maybe they just call it shit. I'd never speak to one of these people to find out.

The toilet turd is a fake poop that goes on a toilet seat so that when someone enters the bathroom next they'll be shocked and hilarified to discover that someone shat on the seat. In point of fact, I have gone into a bathroom in which someone has shat on the seat, and I didn't find it funny. It's more perplexing than anything else, because if the toilet is literally right there, why not shit in it? Why shit on the seat? Recreating this mind-boggling event is not funny. Plus you just end up with a fake turd you have to wash because you put it on the toilet seat.

#8. I Heart Farting Mug

What the fuck? This is one of those jokes that can only dare dream to work if you and everyone who has mastered literacy refuse to hold a thought in your head for more than the ephemeral instant in which recognition of the words being read sets in. Because if you for even a brief second ponder a statement like this, you'll make that face you make when someone actually does fart as you try to figure out who or why anyone would ever say this. Do you really love farting? Do you have chronic gas issues and you need to expel that gas to alleviate stomach pains? I'm very sorry to hear that. Why is it on your mug? It sounds most questionable. It makes me suspect that your home computer's keys are veritably caked with spooge and toaster strudel frosting. Please keep your awfulness to yourself.

#7. Yodeling Pickle

I honestly don't need to write this entry beyond the name of it, because look. Just reread it. That such a thing should exist is a great disservice to our species because it means that someone, somewhere, was struck with what they assumed was inspiration, but which the rest of us will recognize as fever dreams or diphtheria symptoms, and made an electronic pickle that yodels. They then presented this idea to others and enough people backed it that it became an item mass-produced and marketed. This is how cults and oppressive, totalitarian regimes get started -- when no one is willing to stop madness before it gets out of control.

To whom does this appeal? Yodelers or pickle aficionados? Even those people who enjoy musical brine-cured vegetation could only mildly enjoy this. Have you ever met anyone with a musical novelty gift in their home who routinely enjoyed the gift? Do you know people who queue up their Big Mouth Billy Bass at parties? Those people are refuse. They're bad in the soul. Eliminate them.

#6. Fake Lottery Tickets

The fake lottery ticket is the ultimate gift for someone you only pretend to like but whose disappointment really kind of gives you a bit of a boner (for you ladies, a lady boner). Each scratch-off ticket is a winner, convincing your poor sap of a target that they are now excessively wealthy. Except of course they're not, so you just gifted them with brief joy and then crushing loss as their hopes of financial independence and security are dashed on the black, jagged rocks of your dead, decrepit heart.